The Boston Massacre: A Family History, by Serena Zabin ⭐⭐⭐

The author of The Boston Massacre: A Family History presents an interesting thesis, that the amount of social interaction between the occupying British troops and American colonists turned the so-called “Boston Massacre” and the later Revolutionary War into “family conflicts”.

According to the descriptive blurb, “… the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political. […] When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution. Serena Zabin’s The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history.”

In my view, this book fails to live up to its billing, as it never effectively identifies a causal relationship between the personal, social interactions which she describes in great detail, and the actual event – let alone the greater events that followed, and which eventually led to American independence.

Ms Zabin fills the book with numerous anecdotes detailing social interactions between the occupying British troops of the 29th Regiment (and others) and locals – dalliances, marriages, births, business relationships, etc., which is proof of the extensive research behind the book – but does little to reinforce or defend her basic thesis. The event itself – which, though elevated to almost mythic status in American history, amounted to little more than a street brawl resulting in five deaths – is actually given rather short shrift in the text, to the extent that she never names the five men who were shot down by British troops in the incident.

According to the author’s afterword she spent approximately 10 years researching the material behind this book, including time that was funded by various grants. It is, then, too bad that she went to the trouble of gathering all that data only to stumble at the finish line by failing to uphold her thesis that there was a causal relationship between those “human […] bonds” and later events.